A month-long art installation, Jungle-ized: A Conversation With Nature, will take up residence in New York’s Times Square on Friday. The interactive experience includes both video footage and sound recordings from the heart of the Amazon, on the border of Peru and Brazil.

“Everybody calls Times Square the concrete jungle, and we thought to create this idea of inviting the jungle into the concrete jungle,” said Stephan Crasneanscki, founder of Soundwalk Collective, the organization behind the project.

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“So we just took Times Square and drew a straight vertical line along the 73rd meridian and ended up at the heart of the Peruvian Amazon.”

The installation is meant “to encourage a conversation with nature” and to “heighten awareness of the environmental impact of climate change”. Even the group’s filming location – a remote area in the Amazon – has seen “ongoing catastrophic damage” because of climate change, according to Crasneanscki, who spent two months collecting sound and video footage for the project.

Visitors to Times Square will be able to take self-guided audio tours along the busy streets of New York, listening to a soundtrack narrated by Amazon experts Jeremy Narby and Daniel Pinchbeck. The audio composition, composed by Soundwalk Collective and recorded by Francisco Lopez, will also feature voices of Shipibo shamans and noises from the jungle, as listeners are guided “along a jungle tour and into a conversation with nature”. Visitors can listen using the Jungle-ized mobile app or through headphones available at a kiosk on 7th Avenue between 43rd and 44th Street.

The work will be projected on to screens around Times Square Photograph: Lucas Jackson/Reuters

“We created a platform where basically whenever you’re walking in Times Square, you’re walking in real time in the forest, so you can move from a waterfall to different rivers and different landscapes of the Amazon forest,” Crasneanscki said.

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“You are literally immersed in the natural sounds of the jungle and you’re looking at the bustling madness of the city around. It has a very strong effect, showing what we are lacking in our days in cities and how the sound of nature is different from the sound of cars and traffic.”

Every night, from 11.57pm until midnight, visual footage from the Amazon will also be displayed on the electronic billboards of Times Square. The footage, from the film Jungle-ized, was shot on negative film. Visitors are invited “to reveal a ‘positive’ version of the film” by using the negative viewing function on their iPhones. Fred Rosenberg, president of the Times Square Advertising Coalition, says this ensures the film “stands out by literally turning the image inside out”.

“The story of the video is really this idea of the soul and the danger of losing the soul of nature,” Crasneanscki said. “If there’s one goal in this project, it’s to awaken what people are missing. What are we going to miss if we don’t pay attention? What happens if we live in a city where there’s no more trees, no more nature, no more birds, no more animals?”